9 People who should perhaps have given Big Brother a miss

The genuinely brilliant news is that Big Brother kicks off in a few days, and we can’t wait. Derided by some, it doesn’t appear to be very cool to outwardly enjoy the show, but sod that, we’re fans. And not ironic fans who are trying to create some kind of angular haired bandwagon. Actual fans, who have enjoyed summering with these strange individuals from day one. That said, some of the housemates have left us feeling a little bit too uncomfortable, and probably shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. They are all named below. Kinga (above) narrowly missed the cut, despite performing a trick with a wine bottle that even made inanimate wine bottles lurch forward and dry puke…

Caroline ‘Caggy’ O’Shea, Series One

The first series of the show was rather notable by its lack of fame hungry maniacs. Except for this berserk saxophone player/sex toy saleswoman, who became known for oscillating between laughing like a cigar-smoker and silently crying to herself because she thought that Nasty Nick looked at her a bit funny. In many ways, she blazed the trail for numerous future contestants who navigated the same confusing pendulum between utter joy, and navel gazing internal reflection/misery. So good for her. In a way.

Penny Ellis, Series Two

When Penny entered the house, she rather misrepresented herself by claiming to be “a bit eccentric”. As everyone knows, people who are “a bit eccentric” tend to make for magnificent company, but with Penny – not so much. Like Caroline before her, her petrified desire for approval took her down a rather dark road. In this case, one that led directly to an uncomfortable face-off with the abhorrent business prick Stuart, who mutilated her self-confidence after she jokingly called him a twat. After that, she was never the same again.

Tim Culley, Series Three

An awful posho, Tim should never have gone on television. His strategy appeared to be to stand up to Big Brother in a doomed bid to appear cool in front of his boarding school buddies, but instead he came to resemble one of those horrible little toads who like to impress teenage visitors by verbally abusing their own parents. Unresolved childhood abandonment issues aside, Tim rallied the nation against him by shaving his stupid chest when no one was looking, just because he didn’t want anyone to find out that, actually, he had beautiful ginger hair.

Lisa Jeynes, Series Four

Here at Interestment we absolutely despise the phrase “to be fair”, but to be fair to her, on a Big Brother scale Lisa wasn’t that bad. She just so happened to appear during a series which found the producers making the ill-judged decision to create a house inhabited by normal, rational, and predictably boring members of the public. Hence, when she casually suggested that she could probably kill someone using just two of her fingers, the bonkers-ometer became magnified and immediately hit Mad Factor 12. She did, however, make it all the way to 13 when she reapplied to go on the show exactly one year later. They say that lightening doesn’t strike twice in the same place, and, well, it didn’t.

Michelle Bass, Series Five

Quite definitely the most predatory contestant yet – and that includes hysterical Chanelle, and Makosi, who was as mad as a box of oranges. Michelle (above, terrifying a dog) entered the house, then immediately decided that she was going to coax a young university student called Stuart into her terrifying web, and then NEVER EVER LET HIM OUT OF HER SIGHT. Her tactics involved working him into the corner of a room, then ignoring his screaming body language that just wanted her to please leave him alone. Bullying him into accepting her lunging tongue kisses the minute anyone went for a quick wee. And practically demanding sex underneath a table. Along the way, she still squeezed in time to make a standard from the Requiem Mass sound like a Beyonce having a nasty stroke.

Craig Coates, Series Six

Poor Craig. He never really stood a chance. A journey which began with him taking the nomination process very badly indeed, ended with him attempting to explain to a paralytic young disco dancing heterosexual lad that he loved him, and would do just about anything for him. It would have been a moving love story, had this TV show reimagining of Brokeback Mountain not starred a version of Heath Ledger who much preferred doing it with lasses. On the plus side for Craig, 3.9 per cent of viewers voted for him to win.

Sezer Yurtseven, Series Seven

On entering the house, Sezer made some dreadful quip about this being “Sezer’s Palace”, and then things really started to go downhill. He committed the cardinal sin of announcing that he’d probably win the thing, because girls would find him charming and irresistible, before ending up having to scoop great big chunks of egg from his face when he was quickly evicted with 91.6 per cent of the public vote – which, at the time, was a very unfortunate Big Brother record. Some rather tawdry tabloid stories ensued.

Emily Parr, Series Eight

When Emily first appeared on our screens, she sat somewhere on the axis of sophistication between Skins and Peaches Geldof, as a terrifyingly self-assured teenager, who was also a bit posh and unafraid to talk to anyone – so long as the conversation was mainly about herself. In her intro video, she misguidedly declared that she’d recently discovered, and probably christened, a hot new form of music known as “indie”. And unfortunately, a little over a week into the show, she thought it wise to communicate with a black girl by reclaiming the N-word for undeserving white people, before being silently ushered from the house for being racist. On the plus side for Emily, magazines like Nuts don’t have a problem with racism, so long as girls are hot and happy to pose in their underpants they can pretty much say what they like.

Dennis McHugh, Series Nine

Now, we were going to opt for Alexandra from Series Nine. You might remember her – she was the seething inmate with an unsavory habit of suggesting that she’d have people killed on the outside if they messed with her. Hence, frankly, we’re too frightened. So, instead, we thought we’d go for Dennis, who was less scary, but equally impossible to like. His bold claim on entering the house was that he’d never go out with anyone better looking than him – an interesting choice in standards which presumably left him prodding around the rather boggier areas of the gene pool with a muddy stick. He was eventually booted off the show for spitting in Mohamed’s face. As is Mohamed the housemate. Not the founder of Islam.

Josh has been a writer and journalist for the best part of twenty years and has written for modern staples like FHM and Cosmopolitan and The Daily Telegraph and The Sun. He has also written a small handful of so-so books that you can still buy.